I have a situation where I'm hosting a website from a data center.
It's a windows environment and it has a Coldfusion MX application server on it.
My Coldfusion site is using an SMTP address that is within our network (not at the data center).
We recently have had alot of problems with our SMTP server within our company and that is affecting my web app because I am no longer able to send out emails.
I am a Coldfusion programmer with limited Windows Networking abilities so please bear with me.
I would like to know if I can use the built in smtp server on Windows 2003 to send out emails from my coldfusion web app? I will need to send out bulk emails. About 4000 or so but I don't want it to adversly impact my weberver.
Here is my setup. I have 3 Dell rack servers at the data center.
1 Staging server with SQL 2000 and IIS running a coldfusion web app. This is our test environment.
1 Production Database server. Windows SQL Server 2000
1 Production Webserver. IIS and Coldfusion MX 8 Enterprise
The current SMTP connection to an address within our company's corporate network.
I would like to be able to send and recieve emails for my clients using the coldfusion web app.
What would I need to do that? I don't have MS Exchange experience and would like to avoid having to pay for any new software if at all possible. I'm not sure if I have everything I need within Windows Server 2003 or if I need to investigate an open source application.
It's imperative that this be able to handle sending bulk emails while not bogging down the webserver.
Any advice is greatly appreciated.
-Eddie
The actual setup of SMTP is fairly straight forward. If you want to send email out using a port 25 send (instead of say dropping a file in to a location for the SMTP engine to pick up) then you will need to allow relaying, probably from 127.0.0.1 or preferably by sending authentication credentials to the server.
The only other things you need to do is ensure that the server has a valid reverse DNS address and is announcing itself correctly. This is done on the properties of IIS SMTP through IIS Admin, on the Delivery Tab, Advanced in the FQDN box.
However if you are sending bulk email, then how are you going to deal with the bounces and unsubscribe requests? What about the email that is rejected at the point of delivery? If you don't, then the server will get blacklisted. Managing the rejections or having an attitude of "all our email is requested" etc will not help. (I am not saying you do, but newcomers to bulk or those in sales and marketing who don't understand it often have that mindset - our email isn't spam is another common mindset - but one persons marketing message is another's spam to be blocked). People forget that they have signed up, or move jobs and don't unsubscribe. Then you get those who just flag anything that is even remotely marketing or bulk like as spam.
Then there is the issue that IIS SMTP (and Exchange for that matter) is a poor bulk emailing tool.
You would be better of finding something else that can do the job for you, which includes handling the rejections. There are bulk software applications available which will also be more efficient. The SMTP engine in IIS isn't designed for bulk emailing, so unfortunately will use resources, bandwidth and processing power when you send out a mass email, because it is designed to work that way. It is designed to deliver the messages as quickly as possible, not to sit in the background.
-M